We’re seeing businesses of all sizes take their video content creation in-house in order to truly leverage the marketing power of social media. In a recent survey by Statista, 39% of all marketing professionals stated that a marketing manager was responsible for in-house content creation. Companies are increasingly hiring social media and content managers specifically to set up internal content production processes. The move away from relying on external agencies for organic social media makes sense from both a brand and financial perspective. While agencies are full of talented professional creatives, who undeniably make content with beautiful aesthetics, they serve a different purpose. They’re fantastic for flashy high budget ads or promotions, but organic social requires an output frequency and consistency that would be unaffordable when relying on agencies alone. Also, a video with a sky-high production value can actually be detrimental if you lose that authenticity and relatability that people love about social media.

A lot of marketing managers have no experience creating videos themselves and are understandably intimidated by complex equipment and software, falling back to relying on expensive agencies or neglecting their social media presence altogether. In this guide, we’re going to look at everything you need to get your in-house video production up and running, even if you have zero experience. By the end, you’ll see that you don’t need to have a Hollywood level budget to succeed at organic social media.

Equipment

Use what you have, especially at the start. There’s no need to invest $5,000 in a professional camera if you already have a smartphone in your pocket. The quality of phone cameras has progressed so much in the last 5 or so years that many popular content creators don’t ever utilize dedicated cameras. Aside from costs, you probably already know how to use a smartphone camera, but learning how to use a mirrorless camera and lenses can be challenging and time consuming. If you’re doing sit-down videos, all you need is a cheap phone tripod off Amazon and you’re ready to get filming.

In terms of editing, traditional video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve require very powerful computers to run smoothly. With elevate.io’s free online video editor, you can edit your videos directly in Google Chrome, no matter the power of your device, saving you from investing thousands of dollars in powerful hardware for each member of the team.

People

Find one to three people within your business who are really passionate about what you’re doing and would do a great job at generating ideas and telling your brand’s story. Many hiring managers are now assessing social media manager candidates on whether they would do a good job at creating content independently. While big brands are finding success through regular influencer features, you can consider having employees host videos if you don’t have the budget for partnerships with influencers. The data tells us that videos with familiar faces perform better and more consistently than faceless videos. Of course, there are exceptions, it all depends on what your company is offering and what your formats will be.

Simple Video Editor

Unlike external agencies, companies that do their content creation in-house don’t have video editors with the skills required to use professional software like Premiere Pro or Resolve. These pro tools are used to make Hollywood movies with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars, and their complexity reflects that. A marketing manager likely went to business school and not film school, so it’s best to find a simple and intuitive editor that empowers them to edit great looking content without making it a confusing and unnecessarily complex task.

With elevate.io, we’ve set out to build a really modern and intuitive online video editor that can get anybody editing great videos in no time, right in their browser.

Collaborative Functionality

Whether you collaborate within your company or with an agency, giving feedback and working together instantaneously with several people is impossible in traditional video editing software. Historically, video collaboration has looked like this:

Editor renders the video into an mp4 ➡️ upload to the cloud ➡️ send the link over to the reviewer ➡️ download it from the cloud ➡️ reviewer sends feedback ➡️ editor makes edits ➡️ render the video into an mp4 ➡️ send it over for feedback 🔁 rinse and repeat, adding up to hours or even days that you’re sending big files back and forth.

With elevate.io, everything lives in your company workspace in the cloud: the file management, the editing timeline, and the video player; making it unnecessary to ever render, upload or download the video before it has gone through several rounds of review and is 100% complete. In addition, you get real-time collaborative editing and the ability to leave comments on the timeline for asynchronous feedback. If you’ve ever used Google Docs for collaborating on documents, you’ll instantly be familiar with how elevate.io’s collaboration works.

elevate.io

These are the main things you need to consider when setting up content production internally. We’ve designed elevate.io from the ground up for marketing teams, solving the technical challenges that stand in the way of social media success. Sign up for a free account to access intuitive editing, file management, collaboration, and publishing in the cloud on any device with a browser.